Abstract
Concepts and tools supporting the design of environmentally friendly products (including materials, goods or services) have increased over the last years. The Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Products Program (C2CP) is one of these approaches. In this work, the ability of C2CP to reliably determine the environmental performance of products was analyzed through the application of a criteria-based assessment scheme. Additionally, to compare C2CP with three other already established tools (life cycle assessment, product environmental footprint and material flow analysis), the same criteria-based scheme was applied. Results show that C2CP is not scientifically reliable enough to assure that certified products actually have a good environmental performance. The most relevant shortcoming of C2CP relates to its limited assessment scope, due to the fact that neither the entire life cycle of the product nor all relevant environmental impacts are covered. Based on already established tools and their practical implementation recommendations for increasing the reliability of C2CP are provided.
Highlights
Environmental issues have become more and more important in recent years, which led to consumers as well as producers paying more attention to the products they purchase
The criteria-based assessment scheme has been applied to life cycle assessment (LCA), product environmental footprint (PEF) and MFA and compared to the C2CP
Based on the presented literature review as well as criteria-based assessment, the following shortcomings of C2CP, which undermine its reliability to determine the environmental performance of products, are identified:
Summary
Environmental issues have become more and more important in recent years, which led to consumers as well as producers paying more attention to the products they purchase. Examples include carbon [2] and water footprinting [3], life cycle assessment (LCA) [4] or more recently the product environmental footprint (PEF) approach of the European Commission (EC) [5,6]. Many of these methods are accepted by a broad set of international stakeholders as documented by the respective international standards [7,8]. Products shall be designed in a way that they pose no danger to human health and can be recycled continuously By complying to this principle, no waste is generated, and all outputs are inputs for (an)other system(s). Based on these cycles, closed-looped systems can be defined and established
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